Three pheasants, one Land Rover

Another day, another turn of the screw.

As reported by our own Patrick Galbraith in The Telegraph, Labour have announced they are planning a crackdown on pheasant shooting.

In a new land use strategy published on Wednesday, ministers signalled plans to curb the amount of English land devoted to game shooting, noting that it occupies a “substantial area”. While acknowledging the role of well-managed shoots in rural economies and cultural life, they warned of “trade-offs” with environmental, economic, and animal health and welfare outcomes.

The Government said it will consider introducing a licensing regime for game-bird shooting, alongside tighter limits on the release of pheasants and partridges.

This unwarranted intervention to address of non-existent problems draws on three converging political strains. Three pheasants, one Land Rover.

The first is land use. The geographical reality of this Labour government is that housing targets for rural authorities have skyrocketed, whilst those for major cities like London and Birmingham — where the housing crisis is most acute — have been cut. The housing targets for Tower Hamlets — which returns two Labour MPs — has been cut by 56%. The housing targets for my own North Yorkshire — which returns two Labour MPs but twice the number of Conservative MPs — has been raised by a staggering 211%.

But we will not just lose land to housing. As Chris Bayliss has written recently, Ed Miliband cannot change course. The plan to ‘Make Britain a clean energy superpower’ largely rests on the idea of achieving a carbon-free grid by 2030, and includes installing a billion solar panels by 2035. Since generating one gigawatt of solar energy requires 10–11 square miles of panels, this would necessitate roughly 750 square miles — an area comparable in size to Greater London. While rooftop solar installations are generally uncontroversial, much of this expansion is expected to involve solar farms on land in England and Wales. 

That, of course, is not to mention an estimated 4,000-5,000 new onshore turbines to be built, mostly in England. Or that Ed Miliband’s plan requires a far more dramatic 119,850% increase in energy storage capacity than the outlined 30 GW. That means we will require a huge increase in land to house batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro and liquid air energy storage.

Put simply, Labour have different ideas for people’s land than the people who own it. 

The second stream is a worrying tendency governments of all colours have developed in recent years, and that is to roll back the frontiers of freedom as displacement activity for being unable to move the needle on things that materially matter to voters — such as economic growth, or better public services. Our politicians, constrained by a lack of decision space and intellectually incapable of imagining it could be expanded, find themselves impotent, and from this impotence they derive a principle. One can see it in the generational smoking ban, restrictions on junk food advertising, in every decision of needless smallness the government takes whilst there are momentously important issues left unaddressed.

The third strain is the increasingly short temper of the electorate, and the resulting vulnerability of parties who cannot — or will not — move the needle on key issues. This is a particularly painful wound for Labour, having just lost Gorton and Denton to the Greens. However, they think there may be an opportunity here: in taking the fight to Labour across the wide range of issues their base is increasingly estranged from them on, Zack Polanski has transformed them into a slightly generic left-wing grouping with no unique identifiers around the environment. Here, then, may be a space for Labour to take up the mantle as the true party of environmentally-conscious voters. 

The war on shooting has it’s ultimate roots, however, further back. When the great dictator TonÍo Blair banned fox hunting in 2004, it was an imposition on civil liberties thought ought to have been overturned: but the following Tory government’s cowardly refusal to overturn the ban affirmed the state’s authority to curtail the rights of landowners simply because it disapproved of a particular activity, even in cases where the activity had no environmental or public externalities. 

For any lover of liberty lover, a principle was clearly set that the government need no longer justify its interventions beyond mere disapproval. The Conservatives ought to be ashamed of themselves for betraying a principle which was not theirs to betray.

The prospect of a “licensing regime” is particularly worrying for anyone already involved with pheasant shooting. Like allowing the legal fudge of trail hunting, it is intended to create a fudged situation the Conservative Party can allow itself to live with politically whilst creating a deliberately unworkable system, the problems with which can be used as justification for banning it altogether when next in office.

As we have already seen with shotgun licensing, this is also a system by which a hostile government can unofficially strangle field sports: licensing timeframes in some police authorities run into years rather than months, and by reports from friends involved in southern parts of the country some have stopped issues new licences altogether.

Will Reform or the Conservatives seek to overturn the ban? For all their talk of the need for a new birth of freedom, one suspects it will be a simple measure of how many votes are in it for them. In the meantime, whatever the logical or moral rationale for returning to the previous arrangement, it does not matter . Labour need land; there is a five year plan to fulfil. As Wordsworth wrote; ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure from thy rash assault?’